The evening of Monday 14th September produced quite a spectacle that had us, and I’m sure many others around Walmer and Deal as well, craning our necks up to the skies. Tens of thousands of house martins were passing through on their long journey south to sub-Saharan Africa, and the show went on for several hours until it got too dark for us to see them:

And they kept on coming, albeit in lesser numbers, throughout the next few days by which time hundreds of thousands must surely have flown by. Apparently 1.5 to 2.5 million house martins will leave the UK at the end of each summer, which is the number of our breeding adults and all of this year’s young.

John, the bird ringer, put his nets up high in the meadows and played their calls in the hope of ringing some. The birds definitely responded to the calls and came in closer..

..but sadly his poles weren’t quite tall enough to catch any of them.

On 3rd October 2019, however, the other John was ringing in the meadows when some house martins went over. He does have high poles and put his net up, played their calls and in no time at all had caught thirty-seven of them – a number which shocked us all and meant that John had a very, very late lunch that day:

House Martins have got feathery legs to keep them warm when flying at high altitudes, and it is thought that their migration route does indeed take them over the Pyrennes. They also carry the blood-sucking flat flies, Crataerina hirundinis. These flies have poorly developed wings and cannot fly on their own but will normally be tucked in amongst the bird’s feathers. They emerged to see what was going on, though, when the bird was unexpectedly stopped by the net.

John might not have caught any house martins this week but he showed me these two birds below as a cautionary tale because, surprisingly, they are different species. The bird on the left is a chiffchaff and the bird on the right is a willow warbler:

The yellow stripe above the eye is very similar in both birds and, although you can’t see the legs in the photos, I can tell you that they were pretty much the same colour as well. These are two things that I would have used to identify them in the field, although chiffchaffs do also regularly flick their tails and willow warblers don’t. Looking at these photos, the only difference that I can really see between these two birds is that the willow warblers wings on the right are 1cm longer since they migrate further to southern Africa, whereas the chiffchaff winters around the Mediterranean or in north Africa.

Once he had the birds in the hand, John was able to tell that they were different species by looking at diagnostic differences in the primary flight feathers, but, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to do that, they can sometimes be really difficult to tell apart.

He also caught eight blackcaps. A blackcap he had caught back on 1st July weighed 16.9g and this is typical for that time of year. But the eight birds he caught this week were much heavier, varying between 18.8g to 22.6g, having gorged themselves on berries to prepare for their migration.

In a first for the meadows, a family of pheasants is being raised here this year:

Pheasants are native to Asia but have been introduced to most of Europe as a gamebird. Shockingly, an estimated 31 to 40 million of them are released into the British countryside every year in order to be shot, and unfortunately they then proceed to eat our native wildlife. But there is no shooting in the countryside immediately around the meadows and these pheasants have found somewhere where they can live a peaceful life as a small feral population. They will need to be careful of our foxes though.

A young green woodpecker is making a bid to appear on every single camera in the meadows:

Its beak looks especially long here on the perch because its tongue is slightly poking out:

A few seconds later a young wood pigeon flew across onto this perch and this seemed to make everyone feel very uncomfortable:

A juvenile great-spotted woodpecker was also seen in the meadows this week, which is a most unusual bird for here:

And there have been some nice views of the male kestrel as he comes down to have a bath:

Owls have been appearing on the cameras every night and sometimes there are photos of both species on the same night. I wonder if they ever come across each other and how that works out?

On doing a quick bit of research it seems that tawny owls are larger than barn owls and can also be highly territorial and aggressive. If food is scarce tawnies can apparently attack barn owls over their hunting grounds.

There is a little group of extraordinary-looking feral pigeons visiting the meadows at the moment. I’ve never seen ones quite like these before:

We returned from Cornwall to find the large pear tree in the orchard completely stripped of all its fruit. How I wish I’d remembered to put some trail cameras on it before I left. Back in September 2020 we got these amazing photos of tree-climbing foxes and, every September since then, I’ve been hoping for some more:

But this time I have had to content myself with these four images below, all taken on different days, of a fox making off with pears. It is the same fox on each occasion with a nick out of his right ear, and I wonder if he had to climb the tree to get them?

I think it is so endearing how much foxes love pears, but Dave finds himself slightly aggrieved that, once more, he is not going to get any pear crumble.

I am delighted to see that two of the three badger cubs that were born this year have survived the drought and there are currently six badgers in the meadows:

I am also pleased that a little weasel is once more regularly being seen here on the cameras:

This weasel will be hunting small rodents, using its slender body to follow them into their underground burrows.

I got a most unexpected moth in the trap this week:

The heath rustic is a moth of acid heaths and moorlands where heather grows, and it is a very strange sight indeed for calcareous grassland. Below is a map from the Kentmoths.org website showing the previous all-time Kent records for heath rustic:

This week I also ran the moth trap in our daughter Sally’s garden in Wye in the North Kent Downs. Our grandson is nearly four now and it was high time that he gets used to the feel of a large yellow underwing crawling on his hand:

At the end of a long, hot summer, there are lots of autumn jobs that we now need to getting on with. The meadows need to be cut for starters but also the two big ponds have had a terrible time in this dry summer and need some TLC. We have pulled out all the bulrushes that were taking over in the hide pond and its good to see some open water again:

Across in the wood, the summer drought has also taken its toll on the newish pond in the marjoram clearing. Up until this year we had been very careful to ensure that only rain water went into it, but we ran out of rainwater stores this summer and had to top it up with tap water to ensure that it didn’t totally dry out. Tap water will have picked up nutrients from its contact with the ground and, as a result, the pond has now grown duck weed:

This doesn’t seem to worry the jays who are always frequent and enthusiastic bathers:

But perhaps this tawny bowl is a bit concerned?

When I next collected the camera cards in, though, I saw that it had managed to overcome its initial hesitation:

My final photo for today is of our son Jonny who was recently in the Atacama Desert which stretches for a thousand miles between the Andes and the Chilean coast. We might have had a very dry summer here in the UK but the average annual rainfall in the Atacama is just 15mm, although some of the weather stations in the desert have never recorded rain. Because of its high altitude, nonexistent cloud cover and freedom from light pollution, it is one of the best places in the world to observe the night skies:

Twelve months ago our daughter Sarah and her family returned to live in Perranporth in the west of Cornwall, somewhere they had lived and fallen in love with several years before.

Tame rock pipits were pecking around the café tables to pick up any crumbs:

They can now walk down to Perranporth’s absolutely beautiful sandy beach, which has the added attraction of many interesting rock pools at low tide:

I had brought my battery-powered moth trap with me and ran it in their garden one night to kick off their moth list. There do seem to be an awful lot of large yellow underwings around this year and this is good news for the many bat species who are major predators of them:

One of the ways to get to their house involves driving over a low bridge across a stream that flows down their valley to the beach and thence out to sea:

A European eel, Anguilla anguilla, has its lair there, hidden amongst some rocks and weed in the stream by the bridge:

In the last 25 years this species has experienced a catastrophic collapse, with a 95% reduction in its population across Britain. This is probably due to a depressing combination of factors such as overfishing, barriers on their migratory routes, habitat loss and degradation, changes in Atlantic currents as well as pollution in our waters. These animals are now critically endangered in Britain and in many other parts of Europe.

This severe decline in Britain has had significant implications, since they once comprised over 50% of fish biomass in some European freshwater habitats and were a vital part of the food web.

These eels breed in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and the young eel larvae cross the Atlantic and enter freshwater as they swim up our rivers and streams. They then stay there, living in these rivers and streams as well as lakes and ditches, for many years as they mature. Once they are ready to reproduce, they swim back across the Atlantic to return to the Sargasso Sea to lay their eggs and die.

It is estimated that each eel will spend ten to twenty years in our freshwater before returning back across the ocean, although this can apparently be as long as fifty years.

They are generally nocturnal but we put some oily tinned sardines into the stream to tempt the eel briefly out into the open so that we could get a proper look at it:

Excitingly, as the smell of the sardines worked its way downstream, another eel swam upriver to join the one that lives by the bridge:

I had never seen a European eel before but now I find myself a bit obsessed.

Perranporth is indeed a very lovely place to live but is also a long way from us in East Kent and we are experimenting with ways to meet up with them that works best for us all. One option is to turn our stay with them in Cornwall into a fuller holiday and we did that this time. After a few days in Perranporth, we joined a Naturetrek tour called ‘Cornwall – Beavers, Choughs and Cetaceans’.

On the first day of the Naturetrek holiday we walked along the coast from Lizard Point to Kynance Cove and then back across the headland.

A National Trust volunteer we met told us that 140 red-billed chough chicks are thought to have fledged in Cornwall this summer, which is wonderful news indeed. Our group did see around seventeen chough on this walk although I failed to get a photo. A DNA analysis of some of the birds in the Lizard area suggests that the chough have arrived naturally across from Ireland.

There is a lot of the beautiful, but aggressively invasive, hotentot fig growing around Lizard Point. This succulent is a native of South Africa and completely outcompetes rare native plants:

Kynance Cove is very picturesque but was quite busy with other humans, even on a Tuesday after the schools had gone back:

As we walked back over the headland, we found a group of around eighteen wheatear waiting for the right conditions to head south across the Channel:

And we saw a migrating whinchat:

But my highlight of the day was the sighting of a grayling butterfly – a first for me.

Our Naturetrek guide, Oliver, ran his moth trap in the hotel grounds overnight and we enjoyed going through the moths the next morning. A lot of large yellow underwings turned up again:

This female four-spotted footman is a lovely moth. At home in Kent, this would be a migrant moth but I learned that they do now breed in Cornwall and this female could well be resident:

A firecrest with its crest raised in the hotel grounds:

On the second day we went on a seven-hour pelagic wildlife boat trip out of Falmouth harbour. As we waited to be let onboard, we enjoyed watching the thicklip grey mullet, Chelon labrosus, swimming in the shallow waters of the marina:

Skipper Jake took us out to sea on the Spirit of Our Seas:

There is a lot of reflection on this screen below, but it is a sonar image of all the fish that were passing under the boat at the entrance of the river:

For a lot of the boat trip we saw very little wildlife which was unlucky. However, things improved markedly as we started to make our way back to Falmouth. A great mass of seabirds was an indication that there was a bait ball of fish close to the surface of the water:

There were also rafts of manx shearwater sitting on the surface:

It was about then that some common dolphins started bow-riding the boat. For a while there were just three of them but numbers gradually increased to eleven as others arrived to join in the fun.

I could have watched them for hours.

On the third day we visited Woodland Valley Farm near Truro and spent the day with the very inspirational farmer, Chris Jones.

In the morning Chris took us around his farm where his cattle are pasture fed and stay out on the land all year round.

He has planted trees in strips in several of his fields to produce a form of wood pasture:

His fifty head of cattle are then ‘mob-grazed’ along the strips. They are concentrated onto a quarter of an acre in the morning and then moved onto the next quarter of an acre in the afternoon. In this way they gradually work their way along all of the strips in a field and then move onto the next field where they do the same thing.

The benefits of this approach are very convincing. Each grazed area is then left untouched for months, allowing plants to regrow, form deep roots, and flower. No artificial fertilisers are needed and there are no winter housing costs for the cattle. Parasite lifecycles are broken and wormers are often no longer necessary, allowing dung beetles to flourish along with everything else that loves to eat them. As well as that, there is better soil health, drought resilience and much increased invertebrate diversity. Skylarks and meadow pipits hold a special place in Chris’ heart and they do very well indeed with this approach to grazing his land.

For our visit, his cattle were grazing on a quarter of an acre of a sixteen acre field that has not yet had rows of trees planted:

After lunch Chris took us down to the Nankilly Water stream that runs in a valley through his farm and where beavers were reintroduced into a fenced, five acre enclosure in June 2017. They had two kits in 2018 and these were the first beavers to be born in Cornwall in four hundred years.

Before the beavers arrived, it took water ten minutes to pass along Chris’ stretch of the valley. It now takes an hour and a half as it trickles into various pools and seeps out through leaky dams. The information board below has other positive changes that have happened as a result of the reintroduction of the beavers:

Another pleasing view across the beaver-created landscape:

Some trees had been felled:

And here is Chris demonstrating what you need to do if you don’t want the beavers to touch a particular tree:

After seeing around the beaver area, we went off to have some dinner in a local pub. We returned as it got dark to wait for the beavers to emerge:

A mother and one of this year’s kits did come out once it got properly dark and we got good views of them through binoculars. They didn’t seem to mind a strong beam of torch light shining on them.

We got back to the hotel at about 11pm after a long but extremely interesting day in the company of a remarkable farmer who is passionate about all nature, but especially beavers.

On the final day we visited the Cornwall Wildlife Trust Windmill Farm nature reserve, an 85 hectare reserve on the Lizard Penninsula. Since taking over this former dairy farm in 2001, the Wildlife Trust has created more than thirty pools and scrapes and seventeen species of dragonflies and damselflies are regularly seen there. This includes the lesser emperor, which we saw but which I didn’t manage to photograph, and this was a new species of dragonfly for me.

We also spotted this daffodil-yellow female red-veined darter which now breeds on the reserve:

There is a lovely area of heathland on the reserve as well, which was really good for spiders and the caterpillars of heathland moths:

We did find some great spiders. Clockwise from left: the four-spotted orbweb spider, Araneus quadratus, is Britain’s heaviest spider, the gorse orbweb spider, Agalenatea redii, and the wasp spider, Argiope bruennichi

And we found several wasp spider egg sacs:

The spectacular caterpillars we found were, clockwise from top left: The broom moth caterpillar, the drinker moth caterpillar and the fox moth caterpillar

I have lost count of how many Naturetrek trips we have done now, but we have really enjoyed every single one.

There are only around sixty British species of butterfly. After seeing the grayling for the first time this week, I wondered how many of these sixty I have seen and what it would take to see them all? It would be a wonderful project to try to tick the rest of them off over the next few years. I need to properly research this but it would probably mean a trip to Scotland or the Lake District for mountain ringlet and Ireland for cryptic wood white, and there are definitely several fritillaries that I am yet to see too. An enjoyable challenge to look forward to over the next few years!

With August now drawing to a close and schools soon going back, there is a feeling that we are inexorably sliding into autumn.

The two swift chicks that were being raised in a nest box attached to the house have now fledged, and the family should already be well on its way across Europe:

The front lawn has once more been declared out of bounds as delicate autumn lady’s-tresses push their heads up above the soil:

And the ivy bee is the final solitary bee to emerge, timed to coincide with the ivy coming into flower at this time of year:

Wasp spiders are now out in force amongst the meadow grasses, hoping for grasshoppers and crickets to make that fatal error of judgement and end up in their webs:

Badgers have started dragging dry grasses down underground to prepare their living quarters for the coming winter:

There have been some major excavations around the sett as renovations are carried out underground:

The autumn bird migration is now well underway. The cuckoos and swifts have already gone and many more species are starting to follow them. This wheatear below is a new species for the meadows – number 104 – but it’s a shame that the trail camera didn’t get it properly into focus:

John, the bird ringer, has had his nets up in the meadows twice recently and caught some of these migrants as they make their way south. This whitethroat was born this year:.

He also caught some birds that will probably be staying around here this winter. This was one of four young wrens that he has ringed this week:

And this great tit also hatched this year:

It is a very sad fact that this greenfinch below, caught on a trail camera this week, is the first greenfinch that I have seen in either the meadows or the wood for a very long time:

Very soon now the annual cut of the meadows will be getting underway and Dave will be hoping to get the job done before the autumn storms set in. This will inevitably expose small mammals that have, up until now, been safely hidden amongst the long grasses, and usually means that some exciting birds of prey will turn up. The kestrels, though, have been hunting here even before Dave gets going on the tractor:

And the barn owl has been patrolling at night, although this is the best photo I have of it this time:

This week I went along to a family mothing event at Led by the Wild, a not-for-profit community interest company situated halfway between Ashford and Hythe, which manages its thirty acres of land for wildlife, as well as holding events and nature projects. I have to say that I found it all terribly inspirational.

I was with our daughter Sally and her family, and we will now be keeping an eye out for future events being held.

There have been a lot of hummingbird hawk-moths around Kent this summer. They are still mainly migrants to this country, arriving here from southern Europe and northern Africa. They do then breed here over the summer, laying their eggs on plants of the bedstraw family, and these UK-born moths boost numbers towards the end of the summer. There is evidence that they are also occasionally able to survive our winters, although this appears to be the exception rather than the rule:

There aren’t any horse chestnut trees in the meadows and only a couple of them in the wood. These days horse chestnuts look like they are dying back for autumn way ahead of time because of heavy infestations of the horse chestnut leaf miner moth, Cameraria ohridella

This moth was first recorded in Wimbledon in 2002 and has rapidly spread across England and Wales and continues to reach further west and north every year

Several of the adult moths were to be seen resting under the leaves:

It is a small moth whose larvae live in mines within the horse chestnut leaves and, in hot summers such as this one, there can be as many as five generations of the moth a year. They do not kill the tree, but they surely reduce its vigour as, year after year, the leaves will not be producing as much food for the tree as they would otherwise be doing. Much work has been going on in the background to try to find a good way to control these moths and a number of natural predators have been observed. Blue tits, great tits and marsh tits do feed on the larvae within the leaf but, between them, they apparently only take 2-4% of the moth larvae and another solution is still needed.

Elsewhere in the wood, some of the lime trees have nail galls on their leaves:

They are caused by the gall mite Eriophyes tiliae. Each gall is around a centimetre long and is full of tiny pale hairs among which the mites feed. A hole on the underside of the leaf allows the mites to escape in the autumn before the leaf falls. They move to crevices in the bark, especially around the bases of the buds, where they overwinter before making their way to the young leaves in the spring.

I ran the moth trap in the wood for the first time since April. However, I once more had the problem that I have had before in the wood – the moths were too warm and active and immediately flew away as I opened the trap. When I run the trap in the meadows, I have some really cool, deep shade that I can put the trap into for a while before opening it, meaning that the moths then largely stay put. I suppose that one solution would be to return to the wood very early the next morning before the day warms up, and perhaps I will try that next time.

Although most of the moths flew away before I could look at them, I did find several of these fork-palped harvestmen, Dicranopalpus ramosus, in the trap:

Adults can be found in the late summer and they have really long legs – the second pair can each be as much as 5cm in length:

They are omnivorous scavengers, eating a varied diet of small insects, dead organic matter and fungi and algae. Unlike spiders, they do not have venom or silk glands but instead use those forked pedipalps and leg hooks to catch food and tear it into chunks. The species originated in Morocco but has been spreading out from there for some time. It reached the UK in Bournemouth in 1957 and reached Scotland in 2000.

The Walmer Castle wildlife team had a day out to the wood to accompany Dave and me on our August tour around the dormouse boxes. It seems that the number of dormice being found in nest boxes across Kent has been down in the heat of the summer, so I was pleased that we did find three dormice this time to show the team:

We might be slowly stepping into autumn here in the UK, but at the very tip of South America, Argentina is just beginning to anticipate the coming of spring. Our son Jonny and his wife are holidaying there and sent us this photo of a Chimango caracara sitting on the fence with a very daunting backdrop indeed:

We have been reading that the high temperatures around Europe this summer have led to many people choosing to ‘coolcation’ in more northerly climes. But this is taking coolcationing to the extreme and we are looking forward to hearing how they got on.

The notorious Goodwin Sands lie about six miles off the coast of Deal. Historically nicknamed ‘the great ship swallower’, it is a dangerous ten-mile long sandbank where around 2,000 ships have been wrecked over the centuries.

Due to the dangers, the area was guarded by five lightships in the 19th century. Of these, the South Goodwin Lightvessel had a particularly turbulent history. It was bombed and sunk by the Germans in the Second World War and then, in 1954, its replacement suffered a terrible tragedy. On the night of 26th November, the cables to her two anchors broke in a hurricane-force storm and she was wrecked, killing seven of the eight people on board. The one survivor, who was rescued the next morning having clung to the rigging in raging seas for nine hours, had only been visiting the vessel to record bird migration.

The South Goodwin Lightship has now been replaced by a light buoy. In fact, until this week, the East Goodwin Lightship was the only remaining lightship of the five that once guarded the sands, all the others having been changed to light buoys over the years. She was such an iconic sight, and one that was easily visible from the meadows through binoculars. We got a closer look at her when we took a boat trip out to the Goodwins to have a walk on the sands back in 2024:

Below is a better photo of her, taken in Harwich in 2004, presumably when she was on her way out to the sands to replace an earlier model:

The safety of shipping and the well-being of seafarers have been the primary concerns of Trinity House since being incorporated by Royal Charter in 1514. Their two ships, the Patricia and the Galatea, are responsible for maintaining the navigational aids around the entire coastlines of England and Wales and the Channel Islands.

Because of the number of these navigational aids around the Goodwin Sands, one or other of these ships is often anchored overnight alongside the meadows. But it was completely unprecedented that both of them were here, as they were one night this week:

Later on that morning, we saw them working together further out to sea:

It was a couple of days after this that Dave was sitting at the top of the meadows with his birding scope, hoping to point the East Goodwin Lightship out to some visitors. He was very confused indeed when it seemed to have completely disappeared.

He researched this on returning inside and discovered that the East Goodwin Lightship had just been retired and towed back to Harwich by the Patricia. She has now been replaced by a light buoy which will be much easier to maintain. We presume that this happened on the day that both ships were working here together.

If there are any plans for what is now to happen to the East Goodwin Lightship, we cannot find any reference to them. A list of British Lightvessels on Wikipedia shows that some have become photographic studios, social spaces for yacht clubs, and floating art galleries and museums after they retired. Back in 2023 we stayed at Tollesbury in Essex where LV15 rests her old bones. She retired in the late 80s and was bought by the Fellowship Afloat Charitable Trust who provide outdoor activities for kids who sleep onboard the lightvessel, which must be very memorable for them.

Things change and technology marches on, but we will certainly miss that big, red lightship that was always there on duty out to sea.

This week the full-scale replica of the Nao Victoria sailed into Dover and we went to take a look at her. The Nao Victoria was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. It was one of five ships that left Seville in 1519 to try to find a good route to the spice islands, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. But after three years at sea, four of the ships had been lost and it was only the Nao Victoria that returned to Spain, having successfully sailed around the entire world.

A full scale replica of the ship was built in 1991 and, between 2004 and 2006, she repeated the journey of the original ship.

This summer she is visiting Dover for ten days and I have to say that she looked really small and such an odd sight moored up at the modern docks:

Whilst we were in Dover to see the Nao Victoria, we also went for a drink in one of Dover’s oldest pubs, The White Horse Inn, in a building which dates back to 1365:

But it wasn’t its great age that brought us there because it is famous for being the Channel swimmers’ pub. For decades, successful Channel swimmers have come to the pub after their swim to sign the walls and ceilings with their name and the date and timing of their swim.

You have to be in awe of Nora of Mexico who seems to have swum the Channel nine times, including a solo swim in 1994 when she swam from England to France and then back to England again in 23 hours 38 minutes:

I have driven past this pub so many times and now at last we have gone in.

The big news in the meadows is that we have finally had some rain! The drought eventually broke a week ago with some overnight rain and, in the refreshing cool of the next morning, I took this shocking photo from my bedroom window as a record of how dry the summer of 2026 has been:

Hopefully we will now start to see some green returning to this view.

With the breeding season over, John, the bird ringer, can once more play bird calls at his nets. The warblers are already on the move and he caught this young reed warbler in the meadows this week:

And he was cross not to have had his nets up when this pied flycatcher called in for a drink this week en route for Africa:

The blackbirds have started on the sloes:

And this is a rather spectacular photo of a magpie:

I am pleased that a barn owl has been hunting in the meadows most nights recently:

And the trail camera took this photo just at the moment that a stock dove lost a feather:

The two young swifts in the nest box attached to the house are continuing to grow well and spend a lot of their day peering out of the box to await the return of their parents:

It is funny to see the little family at night when the four of them attempt to cram themselves into the small feather nest:

It won’t be long now until they are gone.

My last photo for today is of a curious young fox who peered down at our daughter Lizzie and her partner through their kitchen roof-light in Walthamstow one morning:

I think it gave them quite a shock.

I would like to finish by dedicating this post to my aunt Rhona, whose funeral we went to this week in Cardiff. She was a wonderful lady who very much liked to travel the seas herself. She had a long and happy life and was a big supporter of this blog.

This week we returned for a few days to Curry Farm, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater estuary in Essex:

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946

But it is a moth trap like no other that I have seen before. It is apparently the largest moth trap in the country – a walk-in building with soil banked up around it to keep it cool and a 400 watt metal halide bulb shining on its roof to bring the moths in.

There is a funnel below the bulb into which the moths tumble, eventually ending up in the room below:

As it gets dark the next evening, the moths are allowed to escape for a couple of hours before the door is once more shut and the light on the roof goes back on as the next night’s mothing commences.

Stephen’s father, Bob Dewick, is famous in mothing circles because, in 1951, he discovered a species at Curry Farm that was new to Britain. The moth was given the common name Dewick’s plusia in his honour. After its discovery, the moth remained a very rare immigrant for many years, but has now started breeding in this country and numbers have increased significantly.

I had never seen a Dewick’s plusia before, but this week | saw four of them in the walk-in trap one morning. How very fitting to have seen my first Dewick’s plusia whilst standing next to a Dewick.

All the photos taken in the moth trap come out very orange because of the light in there, but here are two of the Dewick’s plusia moths that I saw this week:

Stephen catches far too many moths every day to count and report them all, so he only records rarities, interesting aberrations, first-sighting-of-the-years and migrant moths.

In this hot weather, he has already been getting lots of migrants. This is a bordered straw which doesn’t breed in this country:

And nor does the Vestal:

The eyed hawk-moth is not a migrant but I include it below because of the face, with eyes and long nose, that it flashes when threatened by a potential predator. This face been proven to deter insectivorous birds:

But, for me, the most astounding thing I saw in the trap was not a moth at all. The great silver water beetle, Hydrophilus piceus, is very large indeed, reaching a length of around 5cm. It is rare in the UK, only being found in a few places such as East Anglia and the Somerset levels. It lives in ponds and ditches but can fly to disperse and is attracted to light so does occasionally turn up in the Curry Farm moth trap:

We also saw lesser stag beetles out on the reserve, which was a new species for me as well:

On the underside of the stag beetle were some hitch-hiking mites which are harmless to the beetle and are simply clinging on so that they can be transported to new food sources:

The 65 acre reserve was looking as parched as our meadows are back home. Dave nearly trod on a large grass snake that was basking on one of the paths and apparently there are adders on the reserve as well:

We noticed quite a few wild plum trees that were dripping with ripe fruit at this time of year:

There was plenty of evidence that these plums were being eaten by the foxes:

Badgers will also be eating these plums as they drop to the ground, and we realised that this fruit must be a valuable food source for them in high summer when the ground is hard and worms are unavailable. On returning home I have immediately ordered three container-grown cherry plum trees to plant out in the meadows this coming autumn. Not only will the cherry plum be the first tree to flower each spring, providing energy-rich nectar for early bees and butterflies, they will also help to feed the badgers in late summer as they await the autumn rains.

We had a gentle few days in Essex in the high temperatures and with our elderly dog in tow, but we really enjoyed it and are planning on returning for a third visit next year.

Back in the meadows, winged ants have been taking to the air to disperse from the hundreds, if not thousands, of ant nests here. Large numbers of black-headed gulls arrive seemingly from nowhere and fly round and round trying to catch them. It is an annual spectacle that we look forward to:

The two swift chicks in the nest box attached to the side of the house are growing fast and I’m delighted to report that both parents are still in attendance:

The ringed kestrel has been a regular visitor to the meadows since 2019. Bringing up three chicks this year has taken its toll and she is definitely looking a bit ropey at the moment. But she has also now embarked on her annual moult, which will progress slowly so that she is still able to effectively hunt throughout. Before too long she should look smart once more:

She has her back to us here as she takes a cooling bath with the male:

And here is one of their young:

Many birds are now moulting following the hard work of the breeding season:

I’m pleased to see both badger cubs still going strong and are out with their mother here:

This week a badger dug a small latrine near the garden and very accurately deposited some dung in it:

They excavated a wasp nest one night to get at the combs full of protein-rich larvae. This is the best photo I got the next morning because there were still lots of very angry wasps buzzing around it and I decided not to get too close:

Over in the wood, another animal that likes to eat wasp larvae has returned to the same shallow pool:

Elsewhere in the wood a common buzzard arrives for a drink:

And I love this photo below of water cascading down from its beak:

Dave recently took this photo of two stock dove chicks that were being raised in the tawny owl nest box:

Five days later we met John, the bird ringer, at the wood so that he could ring them. It hadn’t been very long at all but they had developed so much:

The eclipse on Wednesday evening brought Dave and I out into the meadows wearing our wacky cardboard eclipse glasses:

I have now seen some fantastic images that some people managed to capture of the eclipse, and my best effort below definitely isn’t one of these. However, it is a record shot of a very memorable event

But there was a second significant event in the meadows this week when the partner of our youngest child, Lizzie, told us he wanted to have a picnic in the meadows at which he planned to propose to her. Dave and I did what we could to prepare a magical space for them, setting up the picnic at the top of the meadows with views over the Channel and across to the white cliffs of France:

There was a slight hiccup when he got down on one knee and presented her with a small box that unexpectedly turned out to be completely empty of a ring, and for this he will forever be teased. However, she said yes regardless.

We are now looking forward to a family wedding in 2027.

There was a very interesting visitor to the wood this week:

This is a male honey buzzard, birds with a specialist diet that mainly eat the protein-rich larvae of wasps, bees and hornets. They sit quietly and watch the flight patterns of the insects in order to locate their nests. Once found, they then tear the nest open with their powerful claws to access the combs of larvae. They have several evolutionary adaptations to help them cope with being stung, such as the feathers on their heads which are short and stiff and arranged like fish scales.

It is thought that there are only 130 to 150 pairs of these birds nesting in Britain and this is a shame because they are the only natural predator we have for the invasive Asian hornets that have recently arrived in this country.

As a rare breeding bird in the UK, the location of honey buzzard nests are usually swathed in great secrecy for the birds’ protection. However there was a honey buzzard nest in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex, featured on this year’s Springwatch television programme back in May. As of 3rd August, the live footage of this nest with two chicks is still being broadcast and can be viewed at ashdownforest.org/honey-buzzard-livecam/ although the chicks do now look close to fledging and will surely soon be gone. It is the first ever live streaming of a honey buzzard nest in the UK and I hope that it is being watched closely by experts and that much is being learned.

This week I have been regularly checking in wth the nest to see what is going on. Below the two chicks have just been given a large piece of honeycomb by their mother, out of which they were extracting the wasp larvae:

It is mostly honeycomb that is coming in to the nest, but in this next photo the adult male on the right has delivered a bird chick that he delicately pulled small bits off to feed to his chicks:

Blean Woods is a large area of remote woodland around Canterbury and I am now speculating that perhaps the honey buzzard seen in our wood this week has a nest somewhere there.

But the honey buzzard was not the only new species spotted in the wood. Two botanical experts were doing a survey there recently and found a broad-leaved helleborine in a clearing:

We went to where the botanists had spotted the plant and managed to find six more as well. Most of them were now bearing seed pods, indicating that they have already flowered and that those flowers were pollinated. There has been research to suggest that the flowers of this helleborine mimic the smell of green leaves that are being attacked by caterpillars. The common wasp and the German wasp are drawn to the plant, hoping to predate the non-existent caterpillars, and end up pollinating its flowers whilst they are there.

Although the flowers are greenish and somewhat inconspicuous, we are sorry to have missed them and hope that these plants will return next year.

The third and final new species to be spotted in the wood this week was crawling around on a woodpile:

This very large caterpillar grows up to 6.5cm. I put my hand in front of the caterpillar so that it crawled over it, which gives it some perspective:

This caterpillar will pupate in loose soil or leaf litter underneath the lime tree and this is how it will spend the winter. In the spring it will emerge as an adult, which also looks pretty wonderful:

This spring four tawny owl chicks were raised in a tawny owl nest box attached to a large beech tree at the edge of a clearing. John, the bird ringer, ringed them on 6th May and they all fledged a week later:

The owls had previously nested in the box in 2022 and fledged two young. But where were they nesting in the intervening years? Tawnies are generally faithful to a nest site, but perhaps ours are having to rotate between several sites within their territory because of competition with squirrels? Once a tawny owl has selected a nest site, they are able to defend it but, if the squirrels get to the box first and fill it with twigs and leaves, the box becomes unusable by the owls. Squirrels certainly did nest in the box in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Dave has decided to make a new tawny owl box along the lines of this successful one, and place it at the edge of a newly-created clearing elsewhere in the wood. We hope that this will increase the options for the owls.

While he was up at the box, he had a quick look in and found two stock dove chicks:

We have arranged to meet John at the wood in a few days for him to ring these chicks.

In this continued hot and dry weather the owls have been coming to the ponds every day and it’s so lovely to see them:

Over in the meadows, I was pleased to see this photo of both badger cubs together because I was worrying about how they were getting on in this drought:

And it’s always interesting to get an insight into what the foxes are eating. This is some kind of largish bird:

Whilst this is a rabbit:

This perch alongside the hedgerow is the only one that I ever see sparrowhawks using. They don’t like perching out in the open:

All continues well in the swift box attached to the side of the house. There are still two adults in attendance and the chicks are growing fast:

Last year we found 149 wasp spiders out in the meadows. So far this year we have only found one:

While I was out looking for wasp spiders, I did find this different species which was less than half the size but did also have a lot of yellow on her.

The clouded yellow butterfly is an immigrant to the UK and many more arrive some years than others. We hadn’t seen one at all in the meadows since 2023 but have been happy to see several here this year:

Our son Jonny and his wife are still in Madagascar and continue to send us photos of the sometimes wacky wildlife that they are seeing. This nymph of the flatid leaf bug, Phromnia rosea, is endemic to the tropical dry forests of Madagascar and looks really quite extraordinary:

The adult bugs have wide pink wings which they hold in a tent like fashion, concealing the body. Thus, when they group together, they could well be mistaken for a flower spike:

What a fantastic wildlife experience they are having out there. Look closely, though, and British wildlife can be pretty amazing too.

It has been tremendously dry this summer and most things here have turned yellow. The Agapanthus, sitting at the threshold between the garden and the meadows, is a notable exception. A native of South Africa, it takes this sort of thing in its stride:

The wild pond totally dried up whilst we were on holiday and we weren’t here to take the extreme decision to top it up with tap water. This pond was dug in 2016 and had not dried out completely before:

The hard, dry ground makes life terribly difficult for badgers, for whom worms would ordinarily be 70% of their diet. This photo was taken just as we were leaving for the Outer Hebrides when the grass was still green, but I’m pleased to report that these four adult badgers and at least one of the cubs are still alive:

It was very busy along Walmer seafront last week as the Downs Sailing Club hosted the National Schools Sailing Regatta for the first time in twelve years. How lovely to see the waters in front of the meadows so alive with young people enjoying this wholesome activity:

As we were admiring all the dinghies one morning, ten small planes flew over our heads in formation. It was the Swiss Airforce aerial display team flying their Pilatus PC-7 aircraft up to an airshow at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire:

I am pleased to see that, even in this prolonged dry weather when worms and other soil-dwelling invertebrates must be so hard to come by, blackbird chicks are still successfully fledging:

Song thrushes have learned to switch to snails when worms are not available:

Just below the gate is a snail graveyard with hundreds of shells:

A wren has taken to spreading all its feathers out and sunbathing on this perch:

And a great spotted woodpecker is an unusual sight here in the meadows:

We are no longer seeing the complete kestrel family that had previously been hanging out on our roof, although one or two of them are still calling by:

The ringed female is looking a bit tatty after all the hard work of bringing up her family:

It’s always exciting to see owls in the meadows:

This year two pairs of swifts nested in the swift boxes attached to the side of the house. One of these pairs built a nest but then didn’t lay any eggs, and they have now already left on their migration back to Africa. Hopefully they will return next year to breed.

For a long time it looked like the other pair were also not going to lay any eggs but they finally did, a month later than in the previous two years. There are now two feathered chicks in the box doing well:

The many great green bush-crickets that live amongst the meadow grasses are a tasty snack for the birds:

When I run the moth trap, I try to get to it the next morning whilst it is still dark and before the birds get up. Any moths that haven’t quite made it into the shelter of the trap are vulnerable to being picked off by magpies once it gets light and I feel responsible for their safety. This week I got up at 3am and went out to the trap to turn off the light and pot up any exposed moths.

I was shocked to see a forlorn collection of wings already scattered around in the base of the trap and a great green bush-cricket sitting at the entrance, grabbing moths as they arrived. I managed to catch her and get her into a large jar:

Later the same morning I released her back into the meadows and took a better photo before she jumped away:

The hummingbird hawk-moth is mainly an immigrant to this country from southern Europe and north Africa, although for several years now some have also been surviving our winters and breeding in southern England:

On the other hand, it is far from normal to see clearwing moths. Even though there are probably quite a lot of them around, they manage to keep themselves well under the human radar. This week I put pheromone lures out and caught two additional clearwing moth species. The six-belted clearwing was caught in the meadows amongst birds-foot trefoil, one of its larval foodplants:

And two red-belted clearwing were caught close to a hawthorn tree in the wood:

I have now seen six of the fourteen clearwing species resident in the British Isles. The others that I have spotted, clockwise from top left, are the orange-tailed clearwing, currant clearwing, red-tipped clearwing and the fiery clearwing:

What wonderful things they are.

I feel that hoverflies are generally underappreciated and ill-understood by many people, myself included. As well as the adults being excellent pollinators, the larvae of around 40% of British species are gardeners’ friends, being important predators of aphids.

There has been recent evidence that hoverflies are in steep decline across Great Britain and, given their significance in the ecosystem, I find it amazing that the larvae of only about two thirds of UK hoverfly species have even been described, let alone their lifecycle properly understood.

There are around 280 species of hoverfly in the UK. The larvae of about 20% of these are aquatic or semi-aquatic, living in shallow water, mud or tree rot holes. Another 40% are predatory, eating aphids and other small terrestrial invertebrates. The final 40% of hoverfly larvae live in decaying wood, plant roots, dung or within wasp, bee or ant nests. It feels important to fully get to grips with these lifecycles in order to know how best to conserve them.

I have been admiring two different species of hoverfly this week. This first one is a bit of a corker:

More is known about life cycle of this second hoverfly. It is the great pied hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, which always reminds me of Humpty Dumpty. The adult female lays her eggs in social wasp nests and the hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest.

What is not fully comprehended, though, is how the female hoverfly can successfully sneak undetected into the well-guarded wasp nest.

Over in the wood, the large marjoram clearing has come into glorious flower:

The blossoming marjoram is heaving with invertebrates including many species of butterfly. The silver-washed fritillary is the most magnificent of them all and photos really don’t do them justice. We saw several of these this week:

June’s tour around the dormouse boxes ended up not happening because the only day that we could do was one of the amber heat warning days which would have been madness. So this week we set off on the July tour, with the boxes not having been opened for two months. We had Lottie and Gemma with us, both of whom hope to get their dormouse disturbance licences soon, but need some more experience handling dormice first.

Unfortunately, although we had found eleven dormice on May’s tour, this time we only found three. We speculated that it has been too hot in the boxes and the dormice are making wild nests in more airy places.

The lid of box 29 was firmly stuck down and Dave ended up having to lever it off with a knife. We were all surprised with what we found in there:

My notes from the May tour told me that angry buzzing had been coming from this box and we had wisely decided not to open it. That must have been a tree bumblebee nest because now in the box in July is the nest of the wax moth, Aphomia sociella, whose caterpillars consume the wax, pollen and bee larvae of tree bumblebees. All very interesting.

Other photos from the wood this week:

I finish today with some wildlife sightings from our children. Jonty found a leafcutter bee struggling with an enormous piece of leaf in his greenhouse in Maidenhead. The bee will be using the leaf to make a series of chambers within a tunnel. As she completes each leaf-lined chamber she will stock it with a pile of pollen and lay an egg on it. The resulting larva will live off the pollen that its mother provided for it.

Our other son Jonny and his wife Hayley have been in Madagascar this week and have been sending us photos of many different lemur species and all sorts of other bizarre but wonderful things. This comet moth, Argema mittrei, is gigantic and is endemic to the Madagascan rainforests. The males have a wingspan of 20cm making it one of the largest moths in the World. Here is one clinging to its pupal cocoon:

But the photo below is the most extraordinary of them all to my mind:

It appears to just be a photo of some branches, yet lying along the length of the central branch is a leaf gecko, its head pointing downwards, and with its tail towards the top of the photo. Apparently their nature guide spotted this animal from about five metres away. How amazing is that!

This week we escaped the heat and have been enjoying the much cooler climate of the Outer Hebrides.

The archipelago has nineteen inhabited islands but we spent the week investigating the wildlife on just five of them that are linked together by causeways: Berneray, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay:

The western margins of the islands are covered in glorious machair, low lying coastal grassland growing on windblown shell sand. It is one of the rarest habitats in Europe, famous for its plant variety and vitally important for bird populations.

The 2022 population census recorded just 1,574 permanent residents on North Uist. Only 300 of these live in the capital, Lochmaddy, and the rest are spread out across the island in extremely low density:

Every day of the holiday we visited wonderful beaches that we mostly had entirely to ourselves:

The Outer Hebrides are almost entirely off the main gas grid and rely heavily on tankered oil, and so peat remains an important supplementary fuel to reduce heating costs for the households. However, the tradition of peat cutting is slowly declining as the generation that knows how to cut and stack peat passes on. Additionally, since peatlands sequester carbon, strict regulations are now in place in an attempt to ensure sustainable harvesting:

There were very few hotels and restaurants on the islands. The food shops were nearly all smallish Co-ops, although these were quite well stocked with fruit and vegetables. Not always though:

Over a hundred and ten traditional shielings remain on North Uist, with their thatched roofs held down with boulders:

But these days the home below is much more representative of the sort of place where people live:

Although some things do still need to be held down with rocks:

On the first morning of our stay we were booked onto a boat trip from Kallin Harbour, taking us out into the waters around the uninhabited island of Ronay. We saw at least six white-tailed sea eagles:

The eagles have learnt that it is often worth their while following fishing boats, as well as wildlife boats such as ours, where a single fish was inflated with air and put into the water:

A white-tailed eagle is often referred to as a ‘flying barn door’:

We also saw several golden eagles on the boat trip. The breeding female golden eagle on this territory was lost last year but a new female has now arrived. They didn’t nest this year but there are great hopes that they will breed next year.

The rest of the week was spent travelling around the islands in the minibus seeing what wildlife we could find.

We also saw hen harriers every day. This female was just about to catch a vole:

Red throated, black throated and great northern divers were seen over the course of the week:

By the end of the week we had ninety species on our bird list which is not an enormous total but there were some very good things on it! For the first time ever Dave and I heard corncrakes singing, as they start their second broods, which is something we had always wanted to do.

It wasn’t just birds that we saw:

On one of the beaches several species of jellyfish had washed up. Blue, compass and moon jellyfish here:

I was delighted with my first ever sighting of a large heath butterfly. This is the virtually spotless scotica race of the butterfly which is only found in northern Scotland

I had also never seen this moth before. It’s a true lovers knot, a heathland specialist with its larvae feeding on heathers:

This common hawker was a new species of dragonfly for me:

The islands are a stronghold for rare bumblebees including the great yellow bumblebee and the moss carder bee that feed on the flower-rich machair:

On our last day we were driving to a beach but had to abandon the minibus because the track was flooded:

We continued of foot but when we crested the dunes to look down onto the beach, we found to our surprise that we were not alone:

The Highland cattle were milling around enjoying themselves in the shallows and on the sand.

It was a wonderfully atmospheric sight and we sat for ages watching them all in the sunshine. It will remain in our memories as one of the highlights of the trip.

The last stop to finish up our final day was at the ancient stone circle overlooking Langass Loch – a very photogenic spot indeed:

At 6am the next morning we left our hotel and began our long journey home, this time travelling on the Caledonian overnight sleeper train down from Inverness, arriving shattered but happy towards lunchtime the next day. We might only be a small nation, but the Outer Hebrides to the east coast of Kent still seemed a very long way indeed.

We had always hoped to one day be able to experience what life is like in the remote Outer Hebrides. We probably saw them at their best this week, when they were in flower and in such lovely weather, and we were delighted to have finally got ourselves there.

On a warm, still summer’s evening this week we went on a trip up the Stour to see if we could spot any of the two hundred beavers that are now thought to be living on the fifteen miles of river between Canterbury and Sandwich.

We started at 8pm alongside the Grove Ferry Inn at point A on the map below and travelled south-west where the lovely river has Stodmarsh nature reserve to the south and the railway line running alongside it to the north:

At point B, the tidal influence stopped and the waters became beautifully clear thereafter. We turned around at point C and headed back to Grove Ferry, arriving back in the dark around 10.30pm

The beavers don’t attempt to dam the river but instead live in lodges and burrows along its banks and have also expanded out into the marshy Stodmarsh reserve. We passed four or five beaver lodges as we progressed up the river:

The animals would much rather swim than travel by foot, so they dig canals along their favoured routes away from the river. This is an entrance to one of these canals which apparently stretches for 15 metres:

There is concern about what this concentration of beavers, with all their burrow and canal building, will have on the integrity of the river banks and railway embankment, so cameras have been placed at strategic points to monitor their activity:

We did see around twelve beavers over the course of the trip, although mostly as the light was fading fast and photography was difficult. The best sighting was at the point where we turned the boat around. A willow had fallen into the water there and three or four beavers were out working to strip its bark:

In the photo below a beaver is facing us, just below the slanting trunk and I like its large, black nose:

It is so very wonderful to see wild beavers flourishing in Britain once more after they were hunted to extinction in the 16th century. So much more is now understood about the role this species can play in protecting the country against flooding and increasing our depleted biodiversity, and I hope that the sheer number of the animals living on the Stour doesn’t create problems and earn them a bad reputation.

The ringed female kestrel, who has been with us here for the last seven years, has been bringing her three offspring up to the meadows every day recently. We know when they have arrived because they make quite a racket that is impossible to miss. The young birds are often parked in a Scots pine close to the house:

Or they are to be found hanging out amongst the chimney pots:

Unfortunately, up to 70% of kestrels die in their first year, many starving because of their inexperience in hunting for their food, so I hope these young birds are paying attention to what their mother is now teaching them.

It is the first time that we have been treated to views of a family group of kestrels here.

I have some giants to show you this week. The first is the privet hawk-month, a monster with a wingspan of up to 12cm:

The second giant is a loud and aggressive horsefly that I found in the kitchen. Because we have no livestock or deer nearby, sightings of horseflies are mercifully rare. This Tabanus species was about 2cm long, though, and I was very pleased to remove it from the house:

Whilst the horsefly would happily bite humans, the hornet-mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, in the next photo, poses no threat to us despite being a scary 2cm long. It lays its eggs in wasp nests and its larvae feed mainly on the detritus at the bottom of the nest:

This photo below, taken in the meadows in August 2018, shows a wasp nest that had been torn open by badgers overnight, leaving everything in disarray. However, a Volucella zonaria has arrived and can be seen inspecting the carnage to see if it presented an opportunity for her to lay her eggs:

My final monster for today is a violet carpenter bee that our daughter Lizzie saw in Provence, where she is staying in a chateau with a lovely garden this weekend to attend a wedding:

These bees can apparently be up to 3cm long, which is enormous for a bee, and have a jet black body with amazing iridescent violet-blue wings. Although it is primarily a southern European species, it has now arrived in England and was first spotted breeding here in 2007. It remains very rare here, though, and I have certainly never seen one. They bore into soft, decaying, untreated wood to make their nest and then provision it with pollen collected from flowering plants.

The running of the moth trap is quite an undertaking at this time of year because the catches are so large, and I’m so slow working my way through them. Nevertheless, I am trying to get round to it once a week as I attempt to build up a comprehensive moth list for the meadows. The meadow moth list, only started last year, currently stands at 220 macro moth species and 97 micro moths.

The Sussex emerald is a highly restricted, endangered moth in the UK but the area of shingle below the meadows is one of the places that it does still breed and I feel privileged to get them in the moth trap each year:

The bright wave is another threatened and red data book species that breeds on the vegetated shingle below us, and I catch this moth too at this time of year:

The small blue is the UK’s smallest butterfly and we are lucky to have a colony of them here. This species is highly localised and scarce, mainly because they rely on only one plant, the kidney vetch, to feed their caterpillars. It also doesn’t help, of course, that kidney vetch is only a short-lived perennial. By this time of year, the first brood of adults, flying from mid-May to mid-June, have laid their eggs and these have now developed into caterpillars living within the fading flowers. When I went out looking for small blue caterpillars this week, it didn’t take me very long to find some:

The beginning of July is when ragwort starts announcing itself by coming into flower, and we start remorselessly pulling it up. This huge ragwort plant was hiding in plain sight in the reptile area:

We don’t feel bad about removing ragwort, even though it is good for pollinators, because there is vast amount of it growing locally. It is classified as an injurious weed in the Weeds Act of 1959 and causes irreversible liver damage in grazing animals. Our cut grasses no longer go to make hay but we just don’t want it here anyway, because it is highly vigorous and doesn’t stay in balance with the rest of the plants in the meadow community. If, however, there are cinnabar moth caterpillars on the plant, then we leave it alone, returning later to pull it once the caterpillars have safely pupated into the ground below the plant:

We spent a morning this week in the wood with John the bird ringer, who is progressing the breeding bird survey that he has been carrying out in the wood this spring for the British Trust for Ornithology. A fortnight previously he had checked the raptor boxes and found a stock dove nest with eggs in one of the tawny boxes:

A stock dove had flown from the box as we were putting the ladder up and inside there were two warm eggs, along with a third one that wasn’t being incubated:

We returned this week in the hope that there were now chicks in the box that were the right size for ringing. At this stage the chicks bear little relation to the adult birds that they will grow up to be:

What an extraordinary beak they have. It is broad and black, still with the grey egg tooth at the tip. This egg tooth is a temporary, sharp projection on the upper bill which is used to puncture the inner air cell of the egg for the chick’s initial breaths, and then used to break open the eggshell from the inside.

The beak of an adult bird looks very different indeed:

Both chicks were very well fed and had large, prominent crops that were full of the crop milk being fed to them by both of their parents. The crop milk is highly nutritious but also very liquid and John had to be very careful that the young birds stayed the right way up as he got them down from the box to ring. This is because there is a risk of them drowning in the crop milk should they turn upside down.

He also looked in the tawny nest box that four tawny owl chicks had fledged from back in May. The trail camera looking at the box showed that stock doves had moved in almost as soon as the owls moved out:

When John got the tawny owl chicks out of the box to ring them shortly before they fledged, he took a photo of the floor of the box. We had completely cleaned it out over the winter, but the owls had made quite a mess:

He took another photo of the inside of the box this week:

The stock doves have clearly been busy bringing in lots of twigs and I expect that they will lay some eggs shortly.

Other photos from the wood this week:

This weekend an inspirational home in Deal held its annual open day to mark Swift Awareness Week:

This semi-detached house has 28 swift boxes under the eaves of the roof and, this year, will potentially have thirty chicks fledging from the colony:

There is much to be enjoyed about this plan of the boxes. Interestingly, the boxes facing north-east are by far the least popular with numbers 11 to 18 currently sitting empty. Our boxes here in the meadows all face north, other than one that looks east, and we had thought that this is the recommended aspect so that the boxes don’t get too hot – but this throws that advice into doubt.

New this year is box 19 which is above the conservatory and difficult to access. Therefore the owner, Dan, drilled out from the loft space and the box behind this entrance hole sits in the attic. He said, however, that he had been planning to put three of these in but it proved so difficult to install that there is only one so far. There are already swifts breeding in this box, though, so the concept is good.

We enjoyed seeing a lot of swift comings and goings while we stood in the garden:

It was great to catch up with what is going on in Dan’s swift colony and I got a chance to ask him about our swift pair here, where an egg wasn’t laid until 22nd June, a month later than in the previous two years. He reassuringly told us that his latest egg ever was laid on 21st September and that all ended successfully with the birds setting off on their migration at the very end of October.

So my final photo for today is of the inside of our swift box here where incubation is doggedly continuing:

Hatching is expected on 12th to 15th July.

It has been an extraordinary week because I have managed to tick off two items that have been languishing on my wildlife bucket list for quite some time. During the extreme temperatures of last weekend we stayed at Warren Cottage in the middle of the Tiger Hill nature reserve in rural Suffolk near Sudbury:

Dr Grace Griffiths started renting this charming cottage with her family in 1927 and, when it came up for sale in 1938, she bought it along with several acres of woodland. She was an amazing, selfless woman who absolutely loved this place, and was also a dedicated naturalist, fighting for it to become a protected space for nature after her death. The Griffiths Trust and others now care for the land which has become part of the wider 54 acre Tiger Hill local nature reserve.

We were only staying there three nights and were a bit scuppered by the oppressive temperatures of the heat wave, making us want to hide inside in front of a fan. However, ten species of bat have been recorded on the reserve and, at 10pm when it wasn’t really much cooler but at least there was no blasting sun, we ventured out with our bat detectors.

There are so many lovely mature trees on the reserve, many of which are liberally adorned with bat boxes:

After spending some time out with the bats, we returned to the cottage lawn…

And this was the momentous point that I ticked off an item on my wildlife wish list:

We found seven small but intense green lights shining out from around the edges of the lawn. Using a torch and my camera flash, it was possible to photograph the female glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, whilst she was shining her light to bring in a male:

Already there was a male in the grass below her:

Before very long at all, the male had found the female and he was masking her light with his body which perhaps stops other males from arriving:

Another female that we photographed, though, had attracted far too many males and I wonder how that situation sorted itself out:

Once I had got my eye in for what a male glow-worm looked like, I noticed that they were also being lured into the house when the lights were on at night and then dying on the window sills. I was not too late to save this one:

I have twice found a glow-worm larva in our wood back in Kent and presume that there must be a population there, although we have never visited as it gets dark to see the adult females’ bioluminescence.

With flightless females, dispersal is always going to be a challenge. The female larvae travel across the ground just before they pupate but colonies still tend to become highly isolated, struggling to expand across inhospitable landscape. Males are also confused by artificial light and this is another reason that probably contributes to why the UK glow-worm population has been declining for many years.

I have reported these glow-worm sightings on iRecord and already heard back from the expert that they had one previous record for glow-worms at the cottage dating from1974, and that he was really pleased that they were still there! We are now enthused to further investigate the glow-worm population in the marjoram clearing in our wood. Glow-worms are apparently also to be found in unimproved chalk downloads and old hedgerows so maybe we might also find them in the meadows if we take the time to properly look.

We were in this part of Suffolk last weekend for a very particular reason. Kentwell Hall in Long Melford has been holding immersive historical Tudor reenactments for the past 48 years. Our son Jonty and his wife Ellie were part of this year’s living history experience, along with over two hundred other volunteers.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Kentwell. The volunteers had all made their own costumes and wonderfully stayed in character throughout the day.

After several days of sweltering in the extraordinary temperatures and camping onsite in a tent throughout the hot nights, Jonty said that he was very envious of the Kentwell pigs wallowing around in the mud:

When we were wandering around the moat, a brown hawker dragonfly landed on my sandal. This is the first time I’ve seen this species but it wasn’t around for long enough to get a really good look:

By Sunday the temperatures had returned to a more tolerable level and we went for a walk in the Arger Fen and Spouse’s Vale reserve that lies next to the Tiger Hill reserve where we were staying.

These days I cannot walk past a sight such as this without stopping to see whose nests these are in the sandy ground:

We didn’t have to wait long:

It was a colony of ornate-tailed digger wasps. These solitary wasps frequently nest together like this and hunt small and medium-sized bees. The bees are paralysed by stinging and are then brought back to the nest to feed the wasp larvae

We saw plenty of butterflies at Arger Fen. A pair of ringlets here…

…but we saw the magnificent white admiral and silver-washed fritillary as well, and also purple hairstreak through our binoculars high up in the canopy of the oaks. I didn’t get a photo of the purple hairstreaks at Arger Fen, but I did see one on the lawn at our cottage just as I was sitting on a picnic bench with a glass of wine:

I very much like the idea of combining wildlife spotting with drinking wine, but even I have to admit this isn’t a great photo. Here is a better one from Wiki Commons:

But it wasn’t just glow worms that have been ticked off my bucket list this week. A few days earlier I was sitting in the garden going through the moth trap when I got a phone call from another member of the Walmer Castle wildlife team. She knew that I really, really wanted to see a fiery clearwing moth and she and her husband had just seen one on the beach in front of the castle. I ensured that the moths in the trap were safe, jumped in the car and drove. The fiery clearwing is a red data book species that is fully protected by law against disturbance, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t quietly observe them going about their business. The females lay their eggs on curled dock plants at the top of the shingle beach between Walmer and Kingsdown.

A week or so previously we had been down on the beach in front of the castle photographing tiny fiery clearwing eggs that had been laid at the base of a curled dock leaf:

I am really pleased to now be able to remove the fiery clearwing from the bucket list.

A couple of weeks prior to this I had set some clearwing pheromone lures in the meadows and was delighted to catch both an orange-tailed clearwing and a currant clearwing. I subsequently put the lures out twice more without seeing a further clearwing. This week, however, I caught five orange-tailed clearwings within ten minutes of setting the traps:

They are amazing-looking things and I like their shaggy knees:

A few other interesting photos from this week:

I might have successfully ticked two items off my nature bucket list this week, but there is still plenty on there to be getting on with. Some, such as watching grizzly bears plucking salmon from Canadian rivers, I will never now achieve since we no longer fly. But there are others, like seeing basking sharks cruising through the water with their mouths wide open, that I do still hope to experience one day. I will certainly do my best to make them happen.